[hinkley]

One of my favorite ACM papers was an analysis on how the asymptotic runtime behaviors of various sort algorithms didn't tell the full story, and that the faster algorithms took a pretty big data set before they even broke even with some of the other sort algorithms. In fact I think at even 10,000 records it was still about 30% slower than a 'worse' algorithm and you had to get up to sorting a considerable amount of data before it was 'best'.

I don't know about you, but I don't sort 100k records in a single batch, and if I am it's because I messed up. But I might sort different batches of 100 records 1000 times a minute.